Let's face it: Christian fiction is fun. Even if you're writing a serious-minded study of man's inhumanity to man, there is something exhilarating about story; about creating people and worlds and events; about telling a tale that keeps readers enraptured and maybe - just maybe - leaves them fortified in their walk with Jesus. But for all of the... more...

In what can only be called a genuine intellectual adventure, Russell Berman raises fundamental questions long ignored by literary scholars; Why does literature command our attention at all? Why would society want to cultivate a sphere of activity devoted to the careful study of literary fiction? Written as a tonic to what he calls the debilitating... more...

The author argues that Heroizability, the ability of heroizing the major character, is the required theory for producing meanings in literary narratives introduced in three circles: the author's, the protagonist's, and the reader's. Based on an evolutionary model, heroizability treats literary characters as natural anthroposemiotic entities... more...

This book is devoted to fictional entities or, to be more precise, fictional entities as they emerge from the literary process of storytelling. They encompass the great immortal figures in human literature?Don Quixote, Faust, Sherlock Holmes and so on?as well as the protagonists of single novels such as Anna Karenina, Emma Woodhouse and Emma Bovary... more...

Arguing that genre must play a role in our study of narrative fiction, this tour of the novel examines interactive storytelling scenes in which characters argue about how to tell a tale that meets their respective social and aesthetic expectations. Through intense readings of interactive storytelling scenes in works spanning the 17th through 20th... more...

The years following the attacks of September 11, 2001 have seen the publication of a wide range of scientific analyses of terrorism. Literary studies seem to lag curiously behind this general shift of academic interest. The present volume sets out to fill this gap. It does so in the conviction that the study of literature has much to offer to the transdisciplinary... more...

Metafiction is one of the most distinctive features of postwar fiction, appearing in the work of novelists as varied as Eco, Borges, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. It comprises two elements: firstly cause, the increasing interpenetration of professional literary criticism and the practice of writing; and secondly effect: an emphasis on the playing... more...

Twenty years after the post-apartheid Government took office, this timely text interrogates the extent to which the attitudes, identities and everyday lives of British people have changed in accordance with the 'new' South Africa. New ethnographic research is drawn upon to explore important questions of mobility, locality and identity. more...